The Works of Frederick Schiller

by Friedrich Schiller

If we compare together scientific statement or address, popular address, and fine language, it is seen directly that all three express the idea with an equal faithfulness as regards the matter, and consequently that all three help us to acquire knowledge, but that as regards the mode and degree of this knowledge a very marked difference exists between them. The writer who uses the language of the beautiful rather represents the matter of which he treats as possible and desirable than indulges in attempts to convince us of its reality, and still less of its necessity. His thought does in fact only present itself as an arbitrary creation of the imagination, which is never qualified, in itself, to guarantee the reality of what it represents. No doubt the popular writer leads us to believe that the matter really is as he describes it, but does not require anything more firm; for, though he may make the truth of a proposition credible to our feelings, he does not make it absolutely certain. Now, feeling may always teach us what is, but not what must be. The philosophical writer raises this belief to a conviction, for he proves by undeniable reasons that the matter is necessarily so.

Starting from the principle that we have just established, it will not be difficult to assign its proper part and sphere to each of the three forms of diction. Generally it may be laid down as a rule that preference ought to be given to the scientific style whenever the chief consideration is not only the result, but also the proofs. But when the result merely is of the most essential importance the advantage must be given to popular elocution and fine language. But it may be asked in what cases ought popular elocution to rise to a fine, a noble style? This depends on the degree of interest in the reader, or which you wish to excite in his mind.

The purely scientific statement may incline either to popular discourse or to philosophic language, and according to this bias it places us more or less in possession of some branch of knowledge. All that popular elocution does is to lend us this knowledge for a momentary pleasure or enjoyment. The first, if I may be allowed the comparison, gives us a tree with its roots, though with the condition that we wait patiently for it to blossom and bear fruit. The other, or fine diction, is satisfied with gathering its flowers and fruits, but the tree that bore them does not become our property, and when once the flowers are faded and the fruit is consumed our riches depart. It would therefore be equally unreasonable to give only the flower and fruit to a man who wishes the whole tree to be transplanted into his garden, and to offer the whole tree with its fruit in the germ to a man who only looks for the ripe fruit. The application of the comparison is self-evident, and I now only remark that a fine ornate style is as little suited to the professor's chair as the scholastic style to a drawing-room, the pulpit, or the bar.

The student accumulates in view of an ulterior end and for a future use; accordingly the professor ought to endeavor to transmit the full and entire property of the knowledge that he communicates to him. Now, nothing belongs to us as our own but what has been communicated to the understanding. The orator, on the other hand, has in view an immediate end, and his voice must correspond with an immediate want of the public. His interest is to make his knowledge practically available as soon as possible; and the surest way is to hand it over to the senses, and to prepare it for the use of sensation. The professor, who only admits hearers on certain conditions, and who is entitled to suppose in his hearers the dispositions of mind in which a man ought to be to receive the truth, has only in view in his lecture the object of which he is treating; while the orator, who cannot make any conditions with his audience, and who needs above everything sympathy, to secure it on his side, must regulate his action and treatment according to the subjects on which he turns his discourse. The hearers of the professor have already attended his lectures, and will attend them again; they only want fragments that will form a whole after having been linked to the preceding lectures. The audience of the orator is continually renewed; it comes unprepared, and perhaps will not return; accordingly in every address the orator must finish what he wishes to do; each of his harangues must form a whole and contain expressly and entirely his conclusion.

It is not therefore surprising that a dogmatic composition or address, however solid, should not have any success either in conversation or in the pulpit, nor that a fine diction, whatever wit it may contain, should not bear fruit in a professor's chair. It is not surprising that the fashionable world should not read writings that stand out in relief in the scientific world, and that the scholar and the man of science are ignorant of works belonging to the school of worldly people that are devoured greedily by all lovers of the beautiful. Each of these works may be entitled to admiration in the circle to which it belongs; and more than this, both, fundamentally, may be quite of equal value; but it would be requiring an impossibility to expect that the work which demands all the application of the thinker should at the same time offer an easy recreation to the man who is only a fine wit.

For the same reason I consider that it is hurtful to choose for the instruction of youth books in which scientific matters are clothed in an attractive style. I do not speak here of those in which the substance is sacrificed to the form, but of certain writings really excellent, which are sufficiently well digested to stand the strictest examination, but which do not offer their proofs by their very form. No doubt books of this kind attain their end, they are read; but this is always at the cost of a more important end, the end for which they ought to be read. In this sort of reading the understanding is never exercised save in as far as it agrees with the fancy; it does not learn to distinguish the form from the substance, nor to act alone as pure understanding. And yet the exercise of the pure understanding is in itself an essential and capital point in the instruction of youth; and very often the exercise itself of thought is much more important than the object on which it is exercised. If you wish for a matter to be done seriously, be very careful not to announce it as a diversion. It is preferable, on the contrary, to secure attention and effort by the very form that is employed, and to use a kind of violence to draw minds over from the passive to an active state. The professor ought never to hide from his pupil the exact regularity of the method; he ought rather to fix his attention on it, and if possible to make him desire this strictness. The student ought to learn to pursue an end, and in the interest of that end to put up with a difficult process. He ought early to aspire to that loftier satisfaction which is the reward of exertion. In a scientific lecture the senses are altogether set aside; in an aesthetic address it is wished to interest them. What is the result? A writing or conversation of the aesthetic class is devoured with interest; but questions are put as to its conclusions; the hearer is scarcely able to give an answer. And this is quite natural, as here the conceptions reach the mind only in entire masses, and the understanding only knows what it analyzes. The mind during a lecture of this kind is more passive than active, and the intellect only possesses what it has produced by its own activity.

However, all this applies only to the vulgarly beautiful, and to a vulgar fashion of perceiving beauty. True beauty reposes on the strictest limitation, on the most exact definition, on the highest and most intimate necessity. Only this limitation ought rather to let itself be sought for than be imposed violently. It requires the most perfect conformity to law, but this must appear quite natural. A product that unites these conditions will fully satisfy the understanding as soon as study is made of it. But exactly because this result is really beautiful, its conformity is not expressed; it does not take the understanding apart to address it exclusively; it is a harmonious unity which addresses the entire man—all his faculties together; it is nature speaking to nature.

A vulgar criticism may perhaps find it empty, paltry, and too little determined. He who has no other knowledge than that of distinguishing, and no other sense than that for the particular, is actually pained by what is precisely the triumph of art, this harmonious unity where the parts are blended in a pure entirety. No doubt it is necessary, in a philosophical discourse, that the understanding, as a faculty of analysis, find what will satisfy it; it must obtain single concrete results; this is the essential that must not by any means be lost sight of. But if the writer, while giving all possible precision to the substance of his conceptions, has taken the necessary measures to enable the understanding, as soon as it will take the trouble, to find of necessity these truths, I do not see that he is a less good writer because he has approached more to the highest perfection. Nature always acts as a harmonious unity, and when she loses this in her efforts after abstraction, nothing appears more urgent to her than to re-establish it, and the writer we are speaking of is not less commendable if he obeys nature by attaching to the understanding what had been separated by abstraction, and when, by appealing at the same time to the sensuous and to the spiritual faculties, he addresses altogether the entire man. No doubt the vulgar critic will give very scant thanks to this writer for having given him a double task. For vulgar criticism has not the feeling for this harmony, it only runs after details, and even in the Basilica of St. Peter would exclusively attend to the pillars on which the ethereal edifice reposes. The fact is that this critic must begin by translating it to understand it—in the same way that the pure understanding, left to itself, if it meets beauty and harmony, either in nature or in art, must begin by transferring them into its own language—and by decomposing it, by doing in fact what the pupil does who spells before reading. But it is not from the narrow mind of his readers that the writer who expresses his conceptions in the language of the beautiful receives his laws. The ideal which he carries in himself is the goal at which he aims without troubling himself as to who follows and who remains behind. Many will stay behind; for if it be a rare thing to find readers simply capable of thinking, it is infinitely more rare to meet any who can think with imagination. Thus our writer, by the force of circumstances, will fall out, on the one hand, with those who have only intuitive ideas and feelings, for he imposes on them a painful task by forcing them to think; and, on the other hand, he aggravates those who only know how to think, for he asks of them what is absolutely impossible—to give a living, animated form to conception. But as both only represent true humanity very imperfectly—that normal humanity which requires the absolute harmony of these two operations—their contradictory objections have no weight, and if their judgments prove anything, it is rather that the author has succeeded in attaining his end. The abstract thinker finds that the substance of the work is solidly thought; the reader of intuitive ideas finds his style lively and animated; both consequently find and approve in him what they are able to understand, and that alone is wanting which exceeds their capacity.

But precisely for this very reason a writer of this class is not adapted to make known to an ignorant reader the object of what he treats, or, in the most proper sense of the word, to teach. Happily also, he is not required for that, for means will not be wanting for the teaching of scholars. The professor in the strictest acceptation is obliged to bind himself to the needs of his scholars; the first thing he has to presuppose is the ignorance of those who listen to him; the other, on the other hand, demands a certain maturity and culture in his reader or audience. Nor is his office confined to impart to them dead ideas; he grasps the living object with a living energy, and seizes at once on the entire man—his understanding, his heart, and his will.

We have found that it is dangerous for the soundness of knowledge to give free scope to the exigencies of taste in teaching, properly so called. But this does not mean by any means that the culture of this faculty in the student is a premature thing. He must, on the contrary, be encouraged to apply the knowledge that he has appropriated in the school to the field of living development. When once the first point has been observed, and the knowledge acquired, the other point, the exercise of taste, can only have useful results. It is certain that it is necessary to be quite the master of a truth to abandon without danger the form in which it has been found; a great strength of understanding is required not to lose sight of your object while giving free play to the imagination. He who transmits his knowledge under a scholastic form persuades me, I admit, that he has grasped these truths properly and that he knows how to support them. But he who besides this is in a condition to communicate them to me in a beautiful form not only proves that he is adapted to promulgate them, he shows moreover that he has assimilated them and that he is able to make their image pass into his productions and into his acts. There is for the results of thought only one way by which they can penetrate into the will and pass into life; that is, by spontaneous imagination, only what in ourselves was already a living act can become so out of us; and the same thing happens with the creations of the mind as with those of organic nature, that the fruit issues only from the flower. If we consider how many truths were living and active as interior intuitions before philosophy showed their existence, and how many truths most firmly secured by proofs often remain inactive on the will and the feelings, it will be seen how important it is for practical life to follow in this the indications of nature, and when we have acquired a knowledge scientifically to bring it back again to the state of a living intuition. It is the only way to enable those whose nature has forbidden them to follow the artificial path of science to share in the treasures of wisdom. The beautiful renders us here in relation with knowledge what, in morals, it does in relation with conduct; it places men in harmony on results, and on the substance of things, who would never have agreed on the form and principles.